Nest: The Art of Birds

NEST

The Art of Birds

NEST

The Art of Birds

JANINE BURKE

Published by Allen & Unwin in 2012

Copyright © Janine Burke 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin

Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, London

83 Alexander Street

Crows Nest NSW 2065

Australia

Phone:     (61 2) 8425 0100

Fax:         (61 2) 9906 2218

Email:      info@allenandunwin.com

Web:        www.allenandunwin.com

Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

from the National Library of Australia

www.trove.nla.gov.au

ISBN 978 1 74237 829 9

Internal design by Lisa White

Internal illustrations from Orchard Oriole (Plate XLII), by John James Audubon, 1831

Set in 12/18 pt Minion Pro by Bookhouse, Sydney

Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Suzanne Heywood,

who also knew Sister Anthony

Contents

1 At the museum

2 Picturing nests

3 Early birds and bird brains

4 Migrants and writers

5 The poetry of nests

6 What is art?

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Permissions

1

At the museum

I’M A VERY AMATEUR NATURALIST. I trained as an art historian, not a scientist, and what I’ve learned about birds is from observation—often of the most ordinary suburban kind, or on holidays in the country—or from reading, or watching nature programs on TV. I bought my first pair of binoculars not long ago. As my interest has grown, my eyes have become keener. On travels in Europe, America, Australia and Africa, I have watched birds with increasing fascination and admiration. Or noted with alarm their depleted numbers. There are no sparrows left in central London, for example, because the bugs the sparrows feed their babies have gone, so the sparrows had to leave too. Pigeons can endure modern metropolitan life and you will find them trundling beside you on the street, our slightly bedraggled fellow citizens. Pigeons enraged Italian writer Italo Calvino, who declared them ‘a degenerate progeny, filthy and infected, neither domestic nor wild’ and bewailed that the sky of Rome had fallen under their dominion.¹ But we should not be too disdainful of this species. Their skills as messengers contributed to the French victory against the Germans at the 1914 Battle of the Marne, and during the Second World War the British Army’s Air Ministry included a pigeon section. Some of its flock were awarded medals for bravery.

We tend to take birds for granted, in the landscape or in our neighbourhoods. Yet when they’re gone, it’s as though there’s a hole in the sky, in the air, an absence of beauty and grace, and vivid chatter or haunting cries are replaced with eerie silence. The presence of birds communicates the health of a place. They are our contact with wild nature.

The lives of birds have little to do with us directly. They recognise us as predators. Apart from that, they don’t need to see us. They don’t need us; we don’t have anything to teach them—though we can be helpful. I live with birds quite literally: a family of Indian mynas has nested in the air vent in the wall of my study. An excellent position on the second floor, it offers unobstructed views of the surrounding terrain, sea breezes as well as shelter. Location, location, location could be the birds’ motto.

Common mynas, introduced to Australia from southern India in the 1860s, are generally disliked due to their aggressive behaviour. The yellow patch of bare skin surrounding their glaring eyes resembles a bandit’s mask. I once saw a group of them dive-bomb Prospero, my cat, on the front stairs of my apartment block. I’m not sure whether it was retribution for crimes committed or whether they were merely warning him, but he did not use the front stairs again for some time. Often when I’m in the yard, hanging out the washing or getting in the car, the mynas gather on the roof to shriek at me. I yell back, ‘I’m your landlady! How dare you! I’ll throw you out!’ In fact, we have been happily cohabiting for several years. Proximity has softened my attitude. Their bad temper is only for outside, for real and perceived threats. At home, in their nest, their tones are dulcet as they quietly confer at morning and evening. Like the mynas, many bird species have adopted our structures as their own. Mynas mate for life and my neighbours seem a contented couple. They must hear me, clattering away on the keyboard, answering the phone, reading sentences aloud, cursing when the words don’t flow, but I present no danger. We listen to one another’s languages without understanding but also without demur.

Where did swallows live before there were buildings? The easiest way to locate one of their elegant mud homes is to examine the eaves of your house or any other vertical construction, and there you might find, fixed to the wall and protected by an overhanging beam, a neat triangular cupped shape. You might also spot some bright eyes peering back at you or the shaft of a blue-black feathered tail. Swallows rebuild their nests, the same couple often returning to refurbish and breed after their annual migration. The site of the nest can appear perilously exposed. There’s a swallow’s nest attached to a wall near a cafeteria at Melbourne’s Monash University, where I work. By day it’s a noisy, subterranean, fluorescent-lit corridor, one of the university’s pedestrian arteries. The nest, about two metres from the ground, looks vulnerable; the broom of a zealous cleaner or a missile tossed by a prankster could damage or dislodge it. I approach the nest with trepidation and each time feel relieved to see it intact. It’s easy to feel protective towards nests: they are such flamboyant little miracles of design.

I can’t spot the swallows’ nests in Elsternwick Park, close to where I live, because they’re too well hidden. But I know approximately where they are because the swallows begin to circle me with dizzying speed, a tactic meant to deflect intruders. Swallows are inoffensive birds, but to have dozens of them wheeling around your feet and face can be an unnerving experience.

Elwood, lush, low lying and close to the sea, was once a swamp and, like most of the suburb, Elsternwick Park is reclaimed land. It’s a great green swathe ringed by river red gums and it has a children’s playground, sports ovals and a manmade lake occupied by ducks and a family of black swans. (The lake was dug to manage the floods that periodically deluge Elwood. In the nineteenth century, before the bridges were built, folk often drowned at night trying to get from Elwood to St Kilda. They’d set off for the lights of Barkly Street and that was the last anyone ever saw of them.) Though the park seems dominated by team sports and people with dogs, the swans provide the true centre. They are worshipped like gods by the locals, who gaze in awe as the family glides in magnificent tandem from their reed-enclosed nest on the lake’s island. Two winters ago when the female was savaged by a dog who’d scaled the fence which surrounds the lake, the communal outcry was hurt and real. The dog and his hapless owner were threatened with banishment and retribution. In fact, the swan intitially survived her wounds. It was the shock, the awful indelible memory of what had happened to her that left her lingering for weeks and finally killed her. Swans mate for life and the male has remained with their brood, the haughty widower of the lake.

By contrast, when the turtle doves took up residence, I had to chase them away. With their spotted collars, dusky grey-pink feathers and melodious cooing the doves are prettier than their cousins the pigeons. A pair landed on my balcony and decided to set up house on the aluminium casing of the air-conditioning pipe. The casing is narrow and slippery but the doves were determined to build. It is a good position, high and sunny. For several days, the doves brought a selection of grass stems which they deposited on the casing and which immediately slid off. It’s best to be careful around birds, to move silently so as not to alarm them. But, after observing this pair’s fruitless efforts and tired of picking up stems, I loudly remonstrated with the doves, who flew off with shocked faces.

I don’t mean to sentimentalise birds. Most are not gentle, placid creatures but fighters and predators, the determined defenders of their territory. Isaac Watts, the eighteenth-century preacher who coined the cloying adage ‘Birds in their little nests agree’, clearly had not spent much time observing them. Some species of cuckoo have a nasty habit of dumping their egg in the nest of a smaller bird. When the cuckoo chick hatches, monstrous, blind and featherless, it pushes the other eggs out of the nest, then tyrannises its adopted parents for food. Kookaburra kids often kill their brothers and sisters. Hierarchies, for some birds, are cruelly and perfunctorily administered and the punishment meted out to the young, the old or the injured can be brutal. Hens and ducks are bullies who deal with their inferiors by pecking the backs of their necks raw. A friend and I were picnicking at St Kilda’s Blessington Gardens when he pointed out a gathering of white ducks with golden beaks and pristine plumage who were swaggering across the lawn, proud but comical. I noted the straggler in the flock, an isolated creature who seemed too inhibited to join the others. Its neck, tender, pink and pimpled, was denuded of feathers due to the jabs of its fellows. Its fate was sealed, I explained, and it was unlikely that the duck would ever enjoy the same companionship, food or mating rights as the others. My friend told me I’d ruined our picnic.

At Elwood Beach, I watched a silver gull turn to its neighbour dozing on the sand and, without provocation, stab its beak into the other bird’s breast with all the force it could muster. Near my home, a slender canal runs through a verdant water meadow, rich with eucalypts and flowering native plants. In that little paradise, wattlebirds and mynas, magpies and mudlarks fight it out all day, sometimes it seems for the sheer pleasure of shrieking and swooping, like fighter planes, to assert who is faster, meaner, louder. Watching mynas dip and